douglas murray

“Are there flaws in our system? Of course.” “Democracy is the worst system apart from all the others.” Teehee! In other words, “it’s just a few bad apples so there’s no reason to assume there is any systemic cause for these regularly occurring and completely predictable failures of our system to produce results we anticipated and of which we approve.”

What a weak, trite, and tired argument that has been devastated time and time again by others. It isn’t even logically consistent because he begins by arguing that democracy is the best possible system because it has checks and balances. He then goes on to argue that we shouldn’t employ any such check or balance of power that pursues foreign policy. Then what is the point of democracy?

If Mr. Murray is pissed off that people in a democracy hamstrung the ability of their government to do shit that the public did not give them a democratic mandate to do because somebody finally showed them what their supposedly representative government was up to, then why couldn’t I just employ the same flippant non-argument he’s employed here? I could simply say “Well, I don’t know what to tell you, Doug. Democracy is the worst apart from every other system! Oh well. Teehee!” What’s the fucking difference? Is he really so dense that he doesn’t understand that Churchill’s argument is intended to be a rebuttal against people like himself who complain about the potential results of mass politics and democratic public discourse?

He argues that representatives are elected but nobody elected the whistleblowers. Obviously the whistleblowers, like the rest of us, are the ones electing their representatives and how the fuck does anyone know if they are even being represented at all much less make decisions about who to elect without the transparency that whistleblowers provide? Without access to that information, democracy is fucking meaningless anyway because our electoral decisions are meaningless if they are not based on informed choice, so all of this invalidates his initial premise about checks and balances.

His whole position is one long non-sequitur followed by weak ad hominem. The audience doesn’t seem to notice, of course, because it’s all delivered with a charming British accent and groundless Hitchens-eque confidence and bluster.

And how is it possible that the tired and predictable “well at least you can say what you’re saying in a democracy without being killed!” argument still carries any weight with anyone? Half the time, the countries in which they are killing journalists are U.S. backed dictatorships and oligarchies anyway.

Which U.S. backed dictatorship that kills journalist should we be thankful we don’t live in, Doug? Gosh, do you think that maybe they’d stop killing journalists if their Western patrons had to be accountable to the public? And wasn’t that the whole point of what Assange did? To make them accountable for the first time ever? Implicit within his argument is what? That we should turn a blind eye to U.S. clients and proxies killing journalists there so that we can go on not killing them here?

What is this high school debate bullshit? I appreciate that Mr. Murray is a critic of PC “safe space” and identity politics bullshit, but this doesn’t mean he’s right about anything else. I don’t see how this would have convinced anybody whose mind wasn’t already made up. This was some of the most piss-poor and blatantly disingenuous debating I think I’ve ever seen outside of people screaming at each other in obscure youtube response videos. How embarrassing.